Before The Standard and The Americano, There Was The Americana

Thanks to relatively low room rates for a high style hotel in Manhattan, the Hotel Americano is quickly making a name for itself. In fact, we have several friends who just go there for coffee or drinks. Now, were this fifty years ago, we'd all be talking instead about the Hotel Americana, the hot new hotel on the scene in 1962.

The Americana, at 7th Avenue and 52nd Street, towered 51 stories above Midtown and had 2,000 guestrooms, plus five restaurants and numerous ballrooms. Real-life Mad Menthe ad men of Madison Avenuewould absolutely have known it and gone for meetings and/or trysts there.

The cool part of all this is that the Americana still stands...though it's now the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers and the 1960s interiors have long been ripped out in favor of what we'd like to call "modern business conservative."

Next time you stroll down 7th Avenue from up by Central Park, look up instead of down. You'll pass a round, several-story section that sticks out from the base of the main tower. That's what most pedestrians see. Look up, and there's one of the world's 100 tallest hotels and one of the fixtures of the NY skyline, not to mention a design inspiration for the construction of The Standard Hotel.